As any fan of the “West Wing” knows, Friday afternoon is “take out the trash” day in the communication cycle. Particularly, when March Madness is going on and everyone’s still drunk from St. Patrick’s Day/boasting JobsOhio funding.

Today, a bitter and angry Governor Kasich announced that he was permanently removing Mark Kvamme as Director of the Ohio Department of Development and naming James Leftwich to be the new Director. Kvamme will be appointed to a newly created “Director of Job Creation” post within Governor Kasich’s office. In other words, an office switching sham in order to try to […]

Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols has a very difficult job to do. As the press secretary for Governor Kasich, he has work with the media despite his boss’ open contempt for them. In addition, he’s often called upon to defend the indefensible, such as arguing that lobbyist/utility industry executives laden PUCO adequately protects consumers, so it’s okay that Ohio is slashing the budget of the Consumers Counsel by more than half.

But at times, Nichols can exceed his own boss in saying really stupid and politically incorrect things. For example, during the campaign, Rob Nichols forced the campaign and Kasich to […]

The Ohio February jobs report was just released this morning. For the twelfth straight month in a row, Ohio’s unemployment rate dropped from 9.3% in January (which was revised to show a larger drop than initially reported) to 9.2%. The national unemployment rate in February was 8.9%.

Ohio gained 13,600 jobs as the number of unemployed Ohioans also fell. So from February 2010 until last month, Ohio’s unemployment rate went from 10.6% to 9.2%, a 12-month 1.4% decrease. During that time, Ohio GAINED 77,600 jobs. The number of unemployed has dropped 82,000. So, most of the drop in […]

Here’s another fun fact about Kasich’s budget: the cuts in Governor’s office spending are not only much, much lower than in any other are of the budget, but they are most likely not coming out of his staff’s salaries. As a matter of fact, spending on salaries has actually GONE UP since Kasich took office.

We looked at a weekly comparison of salaries associated with the Governor’s office for the second part of February 2011 and compared them to the salaries from the same period in 2010 under Strickland and found that they went up nearly 10% from $83,547 […]

John Kasich loves to talk about “the kids”. He mentioned “kids” 16 times in his state of the state speech. And “babies” 7 times.

John Kasich said he wants to “stand up for our kids” and “make things a little bit better for the families and the kids.” He said he wants to help “mothers and their babies” by giving them “the prenatal care they need”.

Funny story: John Kasich’s budget makes HUGE cuts to programs that help kids and babies, while his own office gets only minor cuts – none of which impact the salary of his staff.